


Hide

by Plooby



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, warning: tanning is gross
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 05:04:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3597363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plooby/pseuds/Plooby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Surely you don't mean to keep that foul thing?" Balin said, as his nose wrinkled against the waft on the air. (shortly pre-movies)</p>
            </blockquote>





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"Surely you don't mean to keep that foul thing?" Balin said, as his nose wrinkled against the waft on the air. Thorin only glanced up at him, short of breath, before turning eyes back to his work.

"Surely I do, else why trouble to cut it free?" Leaving the pelt for now, he slung the warg's head on the stump before him with a faint grunt, and set his boot against it to brace it in place. He hesitated a moment as he hefted his axe, and nodded Balin's way with half a smile. "You'll want to stand away a step."

Balin made no secret of his sigh, but did as he was bid. No sense in worsening the state of his leathers for only the sake of argument. Thorin raised the axe high overhead once he was clear, and brought it down with another huff of breath, straight into the center of the wretched beast's skull. The dome split with a hollow heavy _crack_ , and then Thorin had raised his boot again to press it on the flat of the axe-head, levering with its tilt the two halves of head asunder. A warrior for longer than this thrice-stubborn king-in-waiting had lived, Balin did not consider himself to quail at the sight of any inward things let outward; but even he found he preferred to look at the ground a moment, just now.

The others in their party milled about, tending the fire and sorting through supplies and seeing to the evening meal. Dusk's shadows were lengthening, but slowly, and the work was done at leisure and with much amiable talk. Not entirely easy talk, though, Balin thought: much of it meant to fill a silence that would otherwise bring on long thoughts. The orc-pack had been small, the hunters from Ered Luin many, and they had made as short work of their foes as could be expected, but no dwarf who remembered either Azanulbizar or his father's tales of it could leave such a fight in a merry mood.

Least of all Thorin Oakenshield - although with his hand thrust wrist-deep into a warg's head and then scooping a handful of its brains matter-of-factly out again, he did not precisely cut a solemn figure at the moment, either. Balin shook his head, taking his flask from a jerkin striped black with orcish blood. "The smell will never come out."

"Enough smoke will leach it," said Thorin absently, his voice roughening again as he took up the vigorous work of rubbing brainmeat into the hairless side of the warg's pelt. "It'll be as good as any other by winter, and make a fine cloak or coat, I judge." The makeshift rack of branches he had made to flesh it on tottered with the force of his hands, but held true. Balin did not ask next, and Thorin did not offer, why he would go to such lengths for a warg's loathsome skin when tanners back in the mountains daily made fine work of many a rabbit or fox; but then, Balin supposed that neither of them needed to. It had been many years since Thror's head had been hoisted over a battlefield, but even the Defiler's arm aside, no number of trophies that Thorin might take of his own could ever seem to number enough.

So Balin drank from his flask instead of speaking, and offered it to Thorin when he stood back for a moment's pause. Thorin glanced at him, and raised his hands with a humourous quirk of his mouth, to show both of them fouled with warg brains. Balin sighed again and turned his eyes heavenward, but it was with good humour of his own that he reached to tip the flask to Thorin's mouth on his behalf. Thorin leaned his head back to accept the gift with the trust of a babe in arms - a thing Balin could remember his indeed being, and doubted any other still lived who could - and nodded his thanks before setting back to work.

"This is far afield for orcs," Balin said at last, quiet in the companionable silence that had fallen between them. Giving voice to what none had wanted to speak, none wanted to think, but all must feel; what he had seen in his brother's eyes for the glance they had shared before Dwalin rounded up a few warriors to go ahead, and seek out any stragglers. "They must have been looking for something, Thorin."

Thorin's hands had stilled, and stayed still for a moment more, though his gaze did not move from the pelt. Then they began to move again: working over the hide, kneading it, making of even its ugliness something safe and of use.

"Then they did not find it," Thorin said. And although his voice was even, it seemed on this matter to be all that he would say.

**Author's Note:**

> So I was like "what if the fur on Thorin's coat is warg fur because of what Thorin is like as a person" and then this happened.


End file.
